Anti-communism

Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an intense rivalry. Anti-communism has been an element of movements holding many different political positions, including nationalist, social democratic, liberal, libertarian, conservative, fascist, capitalist, anarchist and even socialist viewpoints.

The first organization specifically dedicated to opposing communism was the Russian White movement, which fought in the Russian Civil War starting in 1918 against the recently established Communist government. The White movement was supported militarily by several allied foreign governments, which represented the first instance of anti-communism as a government policy. Nevertheless, the Communist Red Army defeated the White movement and the Soviet Union was created in 1922. During the existence of the Soviet Union, anti-communism became an important feature of many different political movements and governments across the world.

In the United States, anti-communism came to prominence with the First Red Scare of 1919–1920. During the 1920s and 1930s, opposition to communism in Europe was promoted by conservatives, social democrats, liberals and fascists. Fascist governments rose to prominence as major opponents of communism in the 1930s and they founded the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 as an anti-communist alliance. In Asia, the Empire of Japan and the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party) were the leading anti-communist forces in this period.

After World War II, fascism ceased to be a major political movement due to the defeat of the Axis powers. The victorious Allies were an international coalition led primarily by the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, but after the war this alliance quickly broke down into two opposing camps: a Communist one led by the Soviet Union and a capitalist one led by the United States. The rivalry between the two sides came to be known as the Cold War and during this period the United States government played a leading role in supporting global anti-communism as part of its containment policy. There were numerous military conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists in various parts of the world, including the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, the Vietnam War, the Soviet–Afghan War, and the forces of Operation Condor. NATO was founded as an anti-communist military alliance in 1949 and continued throughout the Cold War.

Anti-communist poster in West Germany in 1953

With the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the world's Communist governments were overthrown and the Cold War ended. Nevertheless, anti-communism remains an important intellectual element of many contemporary political movements and organized anti-communism is a factor in the domestic opposition found to varying degrees within the People's Republic of China and other countries governed by Communist parties.

Anarchists initially participated in and rejoiced over the 1917 February Revolution as an example of workers taking power for themselves. However, after the October Revolution it became evident that the Bolsheviks and the anarchists had very different ideas. Anarchist Emma Goldman, deported from the United States to Russia in 1919, was initially enthusiastic about the revolution, but was left sorely disappointed and began to write her book My Disillusionment in Russia. Anarchist Peter Kropotkin proffered trenchant criticism of the emergent Bolshevik bureaucracy in letters to Vladimir Lenin, noting in 1920 that "[a party dictatorship] is positively harmful for the building of a new socialist system. What is needed is local construction by local forces. [...] Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name".[4] Many anarchists fought against Russian, Spanish and Greek Communists—many were killed by them, such as Lev Chernyi, Camillo Berneri and Konstantinos Speras.

Classical liberals

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels outline some provisional short-term measures that could be steps towards communism. They note: "These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, [these measures] will be pretty generally applicable". Ludwig von Mises described this as a "10-point plan" for the redistribution of land and production and argues that the initial and ongoing forms of redistribution constitute direct coercion.[5][6] Neither Marx's 10-point plan nor the rest of the manifesto say anything about who has the right to carry out the plan.[7]Milton Friedman argued that the absence of voluntary economic activity makes it too easy for repressive political leaders to grant themselves coercive powers. Friedman's view was also shared by Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, both of whom believed that capitalism is vital for freedom to survive and thrive.[8][9]

Objectivism

Objectivists who follow Ayn Rand are strongly anti-communist.[10] They argue that wealth (or any other human value) is the creation of individual minds, that human nature requires motivation by personal incentive and therefore that only political and economic freedom are consistent with human prosperity. They believe this is demonstrated by the comparative prosperity of free market and socialist economies. Rand writes that Communist leaders typically claim to work for the common good, but many or all of them have been corrupt and totalitarian.[11]

Former communists

Milovan Djilas was a former Yugoslav Communist official who became a prominent dissident and critic of Communism. Leszek Kołakowski was a Polish Communist who became a famous anti-communist. He was best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism, which is "considered by some[12] to be one of the most important books on political theory of the 20th century".[13]The God That Failed is a 1949 book which collects together six essays with the testimonies of a number of famous former Communists who were writers and journalists. The common theme of the essays is the authors' disillusionment with and abandonment of Communism. The promotional byline to the book is "Six famous men tell how they changed their minds about Communism". Four more notable anti-communists were Whittaker Chambers, a former spy for the Soviet Union who testified against his fellow spies before the House Un-American Activities Committee;[14]Dr. Bella Dodd; and Anatoliy Golitsyn and Oleg Kalugin—both former KGB and the latter a general.

Religions

Buddhists

Thích Huyền Quang was a prominent Vietnamese Buddhist monk and anti-communist dissident. In 1977, Quang wrote a letter to Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng detailing accounts of oppression by the Communist regime.[27] For this, he and five other senior monks were arrested and detained.[27] In 1982, Quang was arrested and subsequently placed under permanent house arrest for opposition to government policy after publicly denouncing the establishment of the state-controlled Vietnam Buddhist Church.[28]Thích Quảng Độ is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and an anti-communist dissident. In January 2008, the Europe-based magazine A Different View chose Thích Quảng Độ as one of the 15 Champions of World Democracy.

Christianity

The Catholic Church has a history of anti-communism. The most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "The Catholic Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with 'communism'. [...] Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds [...] [Still,] reasonable regulation of the marketplace and economic initiatives, in keeping with a just hierarchy of values and a view to the common good, is to be commended".[29]

From 1945 onward, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) leadership accepted the assistance of an anti-communist Roman Catholic movement, led by B. A. Santamaria to oppose alleged communist subversion of Australian trade unions, of which Catholics were an important traditional support base. Bert Cremean, Deputy Leader of State Parliamentary Labor Party and Santamaria, met with ALP's political and industrial leaders to discuss the movements assisting their opposition to what they alleged was Communist subversion of Australian trade unionism.[35] To oppose Communist infiltration of unions Industrial Groups were formed. The groups were active from 1945 to 1954, with the knowledge and support of the ALP leadership,[36] until after Labor's loss of the 1954 election, when federal leader H. V. Evatt in the context of his response to the Petrov affair blamed "subversive" activities of the "Groupers" for the defeat. After bitter public dispute, many Groupers (including most members of the New South Wales and Victorian state executives and most Victorian Labor branches) were expelled from the ALP and formed the historical Democratic Labor Party (DLP). In an attempt to force the ALP reform and remove alleged Communist influence, with a view to then rejoining the "purged" ALP, the DLP preferenced (see Australian electoral system) the Liberal Party of Australia (LPA), enabling them to remain in power for over two decades. The strategy was unsuccessful and after the Whitlam Government during the 1970s the majority of the DLP decided to wind up the party in 1978, although a small Federal and State party continued based in Victoria (see Democratic Labour Party) with state parties reformed in New South Wales and Queensland in 2008.

After the Soviet occupation of Hungary during the final stages of the Second World War, many clerics were arrested. The case of the ArchbishopJózsef Mindszenty of Esztergom, head of the Catholic Church in Hungary, was the most known. He was accused of treason to the Communist ideas and was sent to trials and tortured during several years between 1949 and 1956. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against Communism, Mindszenty was set free and after the failure of the movement he was forced to move to the United States' embassy on Budapest, where he lived until 1971 when the Vatican and the Communist government of Hungary pacted his way out to Austria. In the following years, Mindszenty travelled all over the world visiting the Hungarian colonies in Canada, United States, Germany, Austria, South Africa and Venezuela. He led a high critical campaign against the Communist regime denouncing the atrocities committed by them against him and the Hungarian people. The Communist government accused him and demanded that the Vatican remove him the title of Archbishop of Esztergom and forbid him to make public speeches against Communism. The Vatican eventually annulled the excommunication imposed on his political opponents and stripped him of his titles. The Pope, who declared the Archdiocese of Esztergom officially vacated, refused to fill the seat while Mindszenty was still alive.[37]

Boris Pasternak, a Russian writer, rose to international fame after his anti-communist novel Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the Soviet Union (where it was banned) and published in the West in 1957. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature, much to the chagrin of the Soviet authorities.[59]

Evasion of censorship

Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc. Individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader, thus building a foundation for the successful resistance of the 1980s. This grassroots practice to evade officially imposed censorship was fraught with danger as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials. Vladimir Bukovsky defined it as follows: "I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and get imprisoned for it".

On 17 November 1989, riot police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration in Prague. That event sparked a series of popular demonstrations from 19 November to late December. By 20 November, the number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague had swollen from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated half-million. A two-hour general strike, involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia, was held on 27 November. In June 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections since 1946.

France

International anti-Communism played a major role in Franco-German-Soviet relations in the 1920s. Pragmatic realists and anti-Communist ideologues confronted each other over trade, security, electoral politics, and the danger of socialist revolution.[80]

French communists played a major role in the wartime Resistance, but were distrusted by the key leader Charles de Gaulle. By 1947, Raymond Aron (1905-83) was the leading intellectual challenging the far-left that permeated much of the French intellectual community. He became become a combative Cold Warrior quick to challenge anyone, including Jean-Paul Sartre, who embraced Communism and defended Stalin. Aron praised American capitalism, supported NATO, and denounced Marxist-Leninism as a totalitarian movement opposed to the values of Western liberal democracy. [84]

India

The Indian state is involved in law and order operations against a long-standing Naxalite–Maoist insurgency. Along with this, there are many state-sponsored Anti-Maoist Militias.

Indonesia

From October 1965 to the early months of 1966, an estimated 500,000–3,000,000 people were killed by the Indonesian military and allied militia in anti-communist purges which targeted members of the Communist Party of Indonesia and alleged sympathizers.[86][87][88] Western governments colluded in the massacres, in particular the United States, which provided the Indonesian military weapons, money, equipment and lists containing the names of thousands of suspected communists.[89][90][91][92] A tribunal in late 2016 declared the massacres a crime against humanity and also named the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia as accomplices to those crimes.[93]

In March 1920, under the Nikolayevsk incident Jewish Russian journalist Gutman Anatoly Yakovlevich began to issue in Tokyo the Delo Rossii, an anti-Bolshevistic Russian newspaper.[94][95][96] In June, Romanovsky Georgy Dmitrievich, who had been the chief authorized officer and military representative at the Allied command in the Far East,[97] discussed with the delegate of Semyonov's army Syro-Boyarsky Alexander Vladimirovich and as the result acquired the Delo Rossii.[96] In July, he began to distribute the translated version of Delo Rossii to noted Japanese officials and non-officials.[96][95]

In 1924, under the Second Zhili–Fengtian WarFengtian clique and the Soviet Union concluded the Fengtian-Soviet Agreement and the Soviet Union took the half control of the Chinese Eastern Railway and its railway zone. In 1925, the Soviet Union ordered the No.94 Order to dismiss White Russians from its railway zone. In 1926, Japan founded in Manchuria the Russia Tsūshin, a news agency for gathering of Soviet information.

In 1928, Japanese army caused the Huanggutun incident and then Fengtian clique came under the Kuomintang (Northern Expedition). In 1929, Sino-Soviet conflict was caused. Under the conflict, the Siberian self-government, which was according to Grigory Semyonov the successor of the Far Eastern Republic,[98] planned the occupation of Primorsky Krai under Japanese support, but when they negotiated to Kuomintang regime the latter was afraid of White Russian's arming.[99] After the Sino-Soviet conflict, defeated China concluded the Khabarovsk Protocol which includes the suppression clause of White Army, but Kuomintang regime disturbed the conclusion of the treaty based on the protocol. In 1932, Japan established Manchukuo in Manchuria and then the Manchukuo founded the Bureau of Russian immigrants to protect the White Russians in 1934.

In summer 1935, Comintern held the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in which they set Japan and Germany as the communizing targets[101][102] and the Chinese Communist Party declared the August 1 Declaration. After that, Japan defined anti-communistic "Three Principles of HIROTA" for relations with China and also Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany. After the concluding, International Anti-communist League was founded in 1937 and the organization held the National Commemoration Ceremony of the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1938.

In March 1935, Manchukuo purchased the North Manchuria Railway and its railway zone from the Soviet Union (Agreement for the cession to Manchukuo of the rights of Soviet Union concerning the North Manchuria Railway). The residents (Harbin Russians) who had Soviet nationality emigrated to the Soviet Union. In 1937, the Soviet Union ordered the NKVD Order No. 00593 to get rid of the relevant people of the White Russian.

In 1948–1951, during the period of American occupation a "red purge" occurred in Japan in which over 20,000 people accused of being Communists were purged from their places of employment.[105]

People's Republic of China

Early anti-communism in China

Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Kuomintang was ruling China and strongly opposed the Communist Party of China, causing the Chinese Civil War. The Kuomintang lost the war and went into exile in Taiwan while the rest of China became Communist in 1949.

Poland

Vladimir Lenin saw Poland as the bridge which the Red Army would have to cross in order to assist the other Communist movements and help bring about other European revolutions. Poland was the first country which successfully stopped a Communist military advance. Between February 1919 and March 1921, Poland's successful defence of its independence was known as the Polish–Soviet War. According to American sociologist Alexander Gella, "the Polish victory had gained twenty years of independence not only for Poland, but at least for an entire central part of Europe".[111]

After the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, the first Polish uprising during World War II was against the Soviets. The Czortków Uprising occurred during 21–22 January 1940 in the Soviet-occupied Podolia. Teenagers from local high schools stormed the local Red Army barracks and a prison in order to release Polish soldiers who had been imprisoned there.[112]

The Polish 1970 protests (Polish: Grudzień 1970) were anti-Comintern protests which occurred in northern Poland in December 1970. The protests were sparked by a sudden increase in the prices of food and other everyday items. As a result of the riots, brutally put down by the Polish People's Army and the Citizen's Militia, at least 42 people were killed and more than 1,000 were wounded.

Polish anti-communist university students

Solidarity was an anti-communist trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. In the 1980s, it constituted a broad anti-communist movement. The government attempted to destroy the union during the period of martial law in the early 1980s and several years of repression, but in the end it had to start negotiating with the union. The Round Table Talks between the government and the Solidarity-led opposition led to semi-free elections in 1989. By the end of August, a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed and in December 1990 Wałęsa was elected President of Poland. Since then, it has become a more traditional trade union.

Romania

The Romanian anti-communist resistance movement lasted between 1948 and the early 1960s. Armed resistance was the first and most structured form of resistance against the Communist regime. It was not until the overthrow of Nicolae Ceauşescu in late 1989 that details about what was called "anti-communist armed resistance" were made public. It was only then that the public learned about the numerous small groups of "haiducs" who had taken refuge in the Carpathian Mountains, where some resisted for ten years against the troops of the Securitate. The last "haiduc" was killed in the mountains of Banat in 1962. The Romanian resistance was one of the longest lasting armed movement in the former Soviet bloc.[116]

The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was a week-long series of increasingly violent riots and fighting in late December 1989 that overthrew the government of Ceauşescu. After a show trial, Ceauşescu and his wife Elena were executed.[117] Romania was the only Eastern Bloc country to overthrow its government violently or to execute its leaders.

Moldova

The flag of the European Union was a symbol for Moldovan anti-communists in 2009

South America

During the 1970s, the right-wing military juntas of South America implemented Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression involving tens of thousands of political assassinations, illegal detentions and tortures of communist sympathizers. The campaign was aimed at eradicating alleged communist and socialist influences in their respective countries and control opposition against the government, which resulted in a large number of deaths.[120] Participatory governments include Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, with limited support from the United States.[121][122]

United States

The first major manifestation of anti-communism in the United States occurred in 1919 and 1920 during the First Red Scare, led by Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer. During the Red Scare, the Lusk Committee investigated those suspected of sedition and many laws were passed in the United States that sanctioned the firings of Communists. The Hatch Act of 1939, which was sponsored by Carl Hatch of New Mexico, attempted to drive Communism out of public work places. The Hatch Act outlawed the hiring of federal workers who advocated the "overthrow of our Constitutional form of government". This phrase was specifically directed at the Communist Party. Later in the spring of 1941, another anti-communist law was passed, Public Law 135, which sanctioned the investigation of any federal worker suspected of being Communist and the firing of any Communist worker.[123]

Catholics often took the lead in fighting against Communism in America.[124] Pat Scanlan (1894–1983) was the managing editor (1917–1968) of the Brooklyn Tablet, the official paper of the Brooklyn diocese. He was a leader in the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and favored the work of the National Legion of Decency in minimizing sexuality in Hollywood films.[125] Historian Richard Powers says:

Pat Scanlan emerged in the 1920s as the leading spokesman for an especially pugnacious brand of militant Catholic anti-communism, that of Irish-Americans who, after suffering from 100 years of anti-Catholic prejudice in America, reacted to any criticism of the Church as a bigoted attack on their own hard-won status in American society....He combined a vivid writing style filled with Menckenesque invective, with an unbridled love of controversy. Under Scanlan, the Tablet became the national voice of Irish Catholic anti-communism—and a thorn in the side of New York's Protestants and Jews.[126]

Following World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union, many anti-communists in the United States feared that Communism would triumph throughout the entire world and that it would eventually become a direct threat to the United States. There were fears that the Soviet Union and its allies such as People's Republic of China were using their power to forcibly bring countries under Communist rule. Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya and Indonesia were cited as evidence of this. NATO was a military alliance of nations in Western Europe, led by the United States, to halt further Communist expansion in terms of the containment strategy.

The deepening of the Cold War in the 1950s saw a dramatic increase in anti-communism in the United States, including the anti-communist campaign known as McCarthyism. Thousands of Americans, such as the filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, were accused of being Communists or sympathizers and many became the subject of aggressive investigations by government committees such as the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As a result of sometimes vastly exaggerated accusations, many of the accused lost their jobs and became blacklisted, although most of these verdicts were later overturned. This was also the period of the McCarran Internal Security Act and the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many records were made public that in fact verified that many of those thought to be falsely accused for political purposes were in fact Communist spies or sympathizers (see Venona Project). It was in this period that Robert W. Welch Jr. organized the John Birch Society, which became a leading force against the "Communist conspiracy" in the United States.

During the 1980s, the Ronald Reagan administration pursued an aggressive policy against the Soviet Union and its allies by building up weapons programs, including the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Reagan Doctrine was implemented to reduce the influence of the Soviet Union worldwide by providing aid to anti-Soviet resistance movements, including the Contras in Nicaragua and the Mujahideens in Afghanistan. The accidental downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 near Moneron Island by the Soviets on 1 September 1983 contributed to the anti-communism sentiment of the 1980s. KAL 007 had been carrying 269 people, including a sitting Congressman, Larry McDonald, who was a leader in the John Birch Society.

The United States government usually argued its anti-communist policies by citing the human rights record of Communist states, most notably the Soviet Union during the Joseph Stalin era, Maoist China, North Korea and the Pol Pot-led anti-HanoiKhmer Rouge government and the pro-HanoiPeople's Republic of Kampuchea in Cambodia. During the 1980s, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was particularly influential in American politics and it advocated the United States support of anti-communist governments around the world, including authoritarian regimes. In support of the Reagan Doctrine and other anti-communist foreign and defense policies, prominent United States and Western anti-communists warned that the United States needed to avoid repeating the West's perceived mistakes of appeasement of Nazi Germany.[127]

In one of the most prominent anti-communist speeches of any President, Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and anti-communist intellectuals prominently defended the label. In 1987, for instance, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Michael Johns of The Heritage Foundation cited 208 perceived acts of evil by the Soviets since the revolution.[128][129]

In 1993, Congress passed and President Clinton signed Public Law 103-199 for the construction of a national monument to the 100 million victims of Communism.[130][131] In 2007 President Bush attended its inauguration.[132]

Anti-communism became significantly muted after the 1980s–1990s Chinese economic reform and the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc Communist governments in Europe between 1989 and 1991, the result of which being that fear of a worldwide Communist takeover was no longer a serious concern. However, remnants of anti-communism remain in foreign policy toward Cuba and North Korea. In the case of Cuba, the United States only recently began to terminate its economic sanctions against the country. Tensions with North Korea have heightened as the result of reports that it is stockpiling nuclear weapons and the assertion that it is willing to sell its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology to any group willing to pay a high enough price. Ideological restrictions on naturalization in United States law remain in effect, affecting prospective immigrants who were at one time members of a Communist party, the Communist Control Act, which outlaws the Communist Party, still remains in effect, even though it was never enforced by the Federal Government, some states also still have laws banning Communists from working in the state government.

Since the 11 September attacks on the United States and the subsequent Patriot Act, overwhelmingly passed by the Congress and signed into law and strongly supported by President George W. Bush, some Communist groups in the United States have faced renewed scrutiny by the government. On 24 September 2010, over 70 FBI agents simultaneously raided homes and served subpoenas to prominent antiwar and international solidarity activists thought to be members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) in Minneapolis, Chicago and Grand Rapids and visited and attempted to question activists in Milwaukee, Durham and San Jose. The search warrants and subpoenas indicated that the FBI was looking for evidence related to the "material support of terrorism".[133] In the process of raiding an activist's home, FBI agents accidentally left behind a file of secret FBI documents showing that the raids were aimed at people who were or were suspected of being members of the FRSO. The documents revealed a series of questions that agents would ask activists regarding their involvement in the FRSO and their international solidarity work related to Colombia and Palestine.[134] Later, members of the newly formed Committee to Stop FBI Repression held a press conference in Minnesota revealing that the FBI had placed an informant inside the FRSO to gather information prior to the raids.[135]

Criticism of anti-communism

Criticisms of anti-communism and accounts of political repression and economic development under Communist rule are diverse. Supporters of various ruling Communist parties have argued that accounts of political repression are exaggerated by anti-communists and that Communist rule provided some human rights not found under capitalism, such that everyone is treated equal regardless of education, financial stability or anything else, any citizen can keep a job or there is efficient distribution of resources. They further claim that countries under Communist party rule experienced greater economic development than they would have otherwise, or that Communist leaders were forced to take harsh measures to defend their countries against the West during the Cold War.

Some Western academics argue that anti-communist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in states under communist rule. Albert Szymanski, for instance, draws a comparison between the treatment of anti-communist dissidents in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death and the treatment of dissidents in the United States during the period of McCarthyism, claiming that "on the whole, it appears that the level of repression in the Soviet Union in the 1955 to 1980 period was at approximately the same level as in the United States during the McCarthy years (1947–1956).[136]

Mark Aarons contends that right-wing authoritarian regimes and dictatorships backed by Western powers committed atrocities and mass killings that rival the Communist world, citing examples such as the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 and the killings associated with Operation Condor throughout South America.[137] Writing in Current Affairs in October 2017, editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson posits that if "Soviet atrocities indict socialism", then "principled and consistent belief" would hold that "U.S support for the killing of 500,000 Indonesian communists indicts American capitalist democracy".[138]

As an example of this alleged double standard, social critic Noam Chomsky has stated in his criticism of The Black Book of Communism by outlining economist Amartya Sen's research on hunger that while India's democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over Communist China—potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and other resources—was nonetheless close to 4 million per year for non-famine years.[142] Thus, Chomsky argued that "supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book" to India, "the democratic capitalist "experiment" has caused more deaths than in the entire history of [...] Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone".[143]

Other academics and journalists, among them Kristen Ghodsee and Seumas Milne respectively, assert that in the post-Cold War era any narratives which include Communism's achievements are often ignored while those which focus exclusively on the crimes of Stalin and other Communist leaders are amplified. Both allege this is done in part to silence any criticism of global capitalism.[144][145]Michael Parenti holds that communist regimes, as flawed as they were, nevertheless played a role in "tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism and imperialism", and chastises left-wing anti-communists in particular for failing to understand that in the post-Cold War era, Western business interests are "no longer restrained by a competing system," and are now "rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years." He adds "some of them still don't get it."[146]

^"The OMRI annual survey of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, 1995", ISBN 1-56324-924-3, 1996, pp. 149–50, the text of the introductory provisions of the law, translated from the Official Journal of the Republic of Albania, no. 21, September 1995, pp. 923–24

^Albania as Dictatorship and Democracy: From Isolation to the Kosovo War, 1946–1998 by Owen Pearson ISBN 978-1-84511-105-2 p. 659

^JONATHAN RAUCH (1 December 2003). "The Forgotten Millions". The Atlantic. Retrieved 14 July 2018. in 1993 Congress and President Bill Clinton authorized the construction, on public land but with private funds, of a national memorial to honor the victims of communism. The act cited "the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial communist holocaust," and resolved that "the sacrifices of these victims should be permanently memorialized so that never again will nations and peoples allow so evil a tyranny to terrorize the world."

^"H.R.3000 – FRIENDSHIP Act". CONGRESS.GOV. United States Congress. Retrieved 14 July 2018. SEC. 905. MONUMENT TO HONOR VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM. (a) Findings.--Congress finds that--(1) since 1917, the rulers of empires and international communism led by Vladimir I. Lenin and Mao Tse-tung have been responsible for the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial communist holocaust

Further reading

Kennan, George F. (1964). On Dealing with the Communist World, in series, The Elihu Root Lectures. New York: Harper & Row. xi, 57 p. N.B.: Also on t.p.: "Published for the Council on Foreign Relations".

The All India Trinamool Congress (abbreviated AITC or TMC) is a national level political party in India. Founded on 1 January 1998, the party is led by its founder Mamata Banerjee, who is the current chief minister of West Bengal. Following the 2019 general election, it is currently the fourth largest party in the Lok Sabha with 22 seats.

The Angamaly Firing was an incident that took place in Angamaly, Kerala, on 13 June 1959, when police opened fire on protesters who had been demonstrating against Kerala's communist government. Seven people were killed resulting in the intensification of Vimochana Samaram, a protest against the then communist led government.

The Anti-Comintern Pact (German: Antikominternpact; Japanese: 防共協定 Bōkyō kyōtei) was an anti-Communist pact concluded between Germany and Japan (later to be joined by other, mainly fascist, governments) on November 25, 1936, and was directed against the Communist International (Comintern).

... recognizing that the aim of the Communist International, known as the Comintern, is to disintegrate and subdue existing States by all the means at its command; convinced that the toleration of interference by the Communist International in the internal affairs of the nations not only endangers their internal peace and social well‑being, but is also a menace to the peace of the world desirous of co‑operating in the defense against Communist subversive activities ...

Anti-Sovietism and anti-Soviet refer to persons and activities actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the Soviet Union.Three different flavors of the usage of the term may be distinguished.

Anti-Sovietism in international politics, such as the Western opposition to the Soviet Union during the Cold War by anti-communism.

Anti-Soviet opponents of Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution and during the Russian Civil War.

As applied to Soviet citizens (allegedly) involved in anti-government activities.

The phrase anti anti-communism has been noted by Clifford Geertz, an American anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study as a term applied, in "the cold war days" by "those who … regarded the [Red] Menace as the primary fact of contemporary political life" to "[t]hose of us who strenuously opposed [that] obsession, as we saw it … with the insinuation – wildly incorrect in the vast majority of cases – that, by the law of the double negative, we had some secret affection for the Soviet Union."Stated more simply by Kristen R. Ghodsee and Scott Sehon: "In 1984, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that you could be ‘anti anti-communism’ without being in favour of communism."Jonathan Chait, in a critique of Stephen F. Cohen used a fully hyphenated form of the term, calling Cohen: "… an old-school leftist who has carried on the mental habits of decades of anti-anti-communism seamlessly into a new career of anti-anti-Putinism."

The Central and Eastern European anti-Communist insurgencies fought on after the official end of the Second World War against the Soviet Union and the communist states formed under Soviet occupation and support.

Prominent movements include:

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought until eradicated in 1956.

The anti-Soviet Hungarian Revolution took place in 1956.

Baltic partisans knew as the "Forest Brothers" fought until eradicated in the early 1960s.

The Forest Brothers (also Brothers of the Forest, Forest Brethren, or Forest Brotherhood; Estonian: metsavennad, Latvian: mežabrāļi, Lithuanian: miško broliai) were Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian partisans who waged a guerrilla war against Soviet rule during the Soviet invasion and occupation of the three Baltic states during, and after, World War II. Similar anti-Soviet Eastern European resistance groups fought against Soviet and communist rule in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and western Ukraine.

The Red Army occupied the independent Baltic states in 1940–1941 and, after a period of German occupation, again in 1944–1945. As Stalinist repression intensified over the following years, 50,000 residents of these countries used the heavily forested countryside as a natural refuge and base for armed anti-Soviet resistance.

Resistance units varied in size and composition, ranging from individually operating guerrillas, armed primarily for self-defense, to large and well-organized groups able to engage significant Soviet forces in battle.

The National Democrats Party (NDP) was a small right-wing political party in New Zealand, formed in 1999 by Anton Foljambe.

The party described itself as "New Zealand's only conservative political party". It was generally regarded as crypto-fascist, but not racist. Foljambe ran as an election candidate two or three times, with poor results. Kyle Chapman became Deputy Chairman of the NDP, and ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Christchurch in 2007, pulling approximately 1% of the vote.The party's policies included strident anti-communism and anti-feminism, the restoration of capital punishment and corporal punishment and strong national defence. It advocated a "corporatist" constitution, and had a conspiratorial view of world events.

Foljambe resigned from the party in 2007. The party now appears to be defunct. Its website is no longer operational.

The National Fascist Union (Unión Nacional Fascista, UNF) was a fascist political party formed in Argentina in 1936, as the successor to the Argentine Fascist Party.In August 1936, UNF leader Nimio de Anquín attempted to force students at a law school in Cordoba to pledge a statement of support for the Spanish general Francisco Franco. Police responded with a crackdown against Argentine nationalists. Support for the UNF surged after two nationalists were shot in the Colegio Montserrat in 1938. In the aftermath of the Montserrat murders, Anquin denounced the middle and upper class for complicity and cowardice and claimed that "communism, Judaism, and degenerate Radicalism" were responsible for causing the murders. Anquín called for the mourners to swear "by God, honour, and the Fatherland, to return the homicidal bullet".By 1939, the UNF was largely defunct, and Anquín returned to his hometown to resume his earlier career as a lecturer.

Pragatisheel India Congress (PIC) is a political party in India that was formed by Somendra Nath Mitra. In July 2008, Somendra Nath Mitra left the Indian National Congress and formed a new party, named, Pragatisheel Indira Congress. In October 2009, the party was officially merged with the All India Trinamool Congress.

The party intends to fight the upcoming West Bengal Legislative Assembly election, 2016 with the primary intention of eroding the vote-share of the incumbent All India Trinamool Congress party which runs the government in West Bengal.Roy, who had formerly been a Railway Minister and also a senior functionary of the Trinamool Congress was expelled from the party in 2015. Initially he contemplated joining hands with either the BJP or the Congress Party but after considering his prospects he decided to not go with any of the national parties and instead went on to form his own party.

Rock Against Communism (RAC) was the name of white power rock concerts in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has since become the catch-all term for music with racist lyrics. The lyrics usually focus on racism and antisemitism, though this depends on the band.

Rooi gevaar (English: Red danger) is an Afrikaans phrase, sometimes translated into English as "Communist danger". The term gained popularity in South Africa during the Cold War and was associated with the perceived threat of international communism to religious, economic, and political freedom on the Southern African subcontinent. This pretext was used to justify the banning of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and its sister organisation, the African National Congress (ANC), which were regarded as leading anti-apartheid movements. Alternatively, the phrase rooi komplot (English: Red plot) was also used.The term diminished in use after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Third Position is an ideology that was developed in the late 20th century by political parties including Terza Posizione in Italy and Troisième Voie in France. It emphasizes opposition to both communism and capitalism. Advocates of Third Position politics typically present themselves as "beyond left and right" while syncretizing ideas from each end of the political spectrum, usually reactionary right-wing cultural views and radical left-wing economic views.

Thúy Nga Inc. (listen) (dba Thúy Nga Productions, variously referred to as Thúy Nga Incorporated, Thúy Nga Paris, and Trung Tâm Thúy Nga) is an American entertainment company founded in 1984 in Paris, and currently based in Westminster, California. The private company is known for its Vietnamese-oriented entertainment, such as the variety show and direct-to-video series Paris by Night, and music released as part of the record label Thúy Nga Music.

The organization had ideology, near to fascism, including creation of a totalitarian one-party regime, ban of market economy and total control by the state over the economy and the society, anti-Semitism and hostility towards foreigners, anti-communism, etc. It demonstrated similarity to the Italian fascism and German Nazism, from which it "borrows" ideas, symbols, slogans.

It was initially founded as Union of the Bulgarian Youth Legions (emblem on the left), which gained popularity among youth by using propaganda methods, popular in Nazi Germany at that time, including a march from Sofia to Veliko Tarnovo. By 1939 the already renamed UBNL had 75,000 members, and while in that year it was formally banned by the pro-Nazi government of Tsar Boris III, it continued to function and was supporting the close alliance of Bulgaria to Nazi Germany.

In 1942 Hristo Lukov, a retired Bulgarian army lieutenant general and former minister of war, became head of the organization. Identifying itself as an extreme monarchist group, it sought unsuccessfully to work with the National Social Movement, before finally emerging as an opposition group that was largely supportive of Nazism, but nevertheless critical of Bogdan Filov's pro-Nazi government, which they defined as consisting of "capitalists, Judeo-Masons and Bolsheviks".Bulgarian historians define the organization as containing the features of the far right. Besides Nikolay Poppetrov, quoted above, Rumen Daskalov describes it as "having a complete fascist character during the years of WWII", which includes "far nationalistic and chauvinistic, authoritarian and totalitarian ideas, but even more tenacious and irreconcilable to any party-parliamentary forms and liberal-individualistic ideas, but also - more characteristically - leadership and elitism, racism, anti-Semitism, etc."

A yearly march with torches, reminiscent of the Nazi marches from the 1930s, in commemoration of UBNL leader Hristo Lukov, is being organized by a far-right informal organization in Bulgaria, calling themselves Bulgarian National Union. The organization describes itself as "ideologically closest to the Union of Bulgarian National Legions".

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